It's all about who you know and there is validity to the 6 degrees of separation theory. As a recruiter I rely on candidate referrals. Most of my searches are for extremely hard (if not almost impossible) to fill positions with companies on the bleeding edge of technology. Here are some of my thoughts and ramblings... who do YOU know?

Thursday, September 01, 2011

I remember my first mobile phone… do you?Go back to the early 90’s with me (yes I said
early 90’s).My husband sold automotive
accessories and was always lugging around this huge brick that he would use to
make calls. Imagine the giant handheld device with a foot long antenna.It was bigger than the satellite phones we
use today.

He lugged that phone everywhere and I’m sure everyone
thought he was incredibly cool and hip.It was a great conversation ice breaker.I didn’t really see the value of having a mobile phone until he
installed one in my car (yes, installed).

At the time I was working for a temporary staffing agency as
an outside sales representative.My
territory was pretty much all of Dallas and I spent the better part of my day
in my car.Having that phone in my car
turned out to be one of the best gifts he ever gave me and initiated my
relationship with mobile phones.A love
affair that continues and deepens every day!

My next phone was a smaller handheld device… anyone remember
these puppies?

Enter the SmartPhone… I’ll never give mine up.You will have to pry my iPhone out of my
cold, dead hand.All my contacts,
photos, emails, personal information – everything I need is on that phone.I enabled the MobileMe locator in the event that
I have a stroke or something and somehow it becomes misplaced.My daughter started college and we
have been talking over Face Time – she has a Mac computer and called my
iPhone.Now that I have my iPad we don’t
even need a phone or phone number to talk.

I’m now on my second iPhone (will have to pay full price for
the iPhone5 now) and received a package from the Apple store yesterday with my
new iPad2 in it.SWEET!!! Couldn’t wait
to get it synced and start using it.

I’ll
probably use it now more than my iPhone since the screen is larger and I can
actually see the WebPages.This will
replace my laptop now when I’m out and about.I can work, take notes, make videos, face time, the possibilities are
endless!

This made me realize just how far we have come with wireless
devices.We started talking on our
mobile phones.Then they introduced this
little tool called texting… what a game changer!Any of you who have children are texting pros
I’m sure.I actually prefer to text now
and find that I don’t use all of my monthly minutes anymore, even downsized to
the minimum package.From texting I have
noticed that I’m using my mobile phone more for work now since my Outlook is on
my phone and I use at least 5 Social Media apps daily.

My iPhone has become my mobile wallet and is used mostly for
the apps and for those occasional phone calls or in case of emergency.Can’t wait to see what’s around the corner… isn’t
technology amazing?

Friday, July 22, 2011

Just when I was getting accustomed to using my twitter handle @leslie12002 (which I still use in my signatures and is a great way to reach me) along comes the new social network, Google+. Thank goodness I have connections and was able to get past the bouncer at the door. Now I’m at the club, just had my first trip to the bar but still watching the crowd to see what’s up. Not sure I’m ready to get out on the dance floor yet. Don’t want to give away all my moves until I’m sure this is a place I want to hang out. Also I haven’t quite figured out yet all the security issues, the bouncer seems like a capable and reasonably good guy but will he be there if I get in trouble?

My first thoughts are to keep this social network for my cool, socially connected friends who share relevant information with a twist of humor. What I don’t want is another invitation to Farmville. I’m a big city girl after all… or is that wicked city woman? I started with just my immediate contacts in my circles, and then I found a list of all the Google employees and decided I had to have a circle for them. Is there a limit to circles? Can I assign which circles come into my home stream? What I really need is a HootSuite for Google+… has anyone found one?

Looking over my 2 week old Google+ ecosystem… I now have 13 circles created thus far, 128 people in my circles with 32 people adding me to their circles. I have no idea how these people found me or why they want me in their circle, I’m not sharing relevant or witty information yet (remember, still at the bar). My first instinct is that they want to sell/send/spam something to me or even worse – stalk me! (Of course I intend to use it for recruiting purposes, after all my momma didn't raise no dumb babies.)

The jury is still out on Google+… for now I’ll continue to monitor my stream and selectively add to my circles. I'm open to suggestions and creative solutions. Let me know if you have anything that will sway me, all I need is a good reason to bust a move!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Someone at LinkedIn must have read my previous post... have you seen the new features under your settings page?(I don’t remember it being this way before, but then again, my memory isn’t exactly the steel trap it was in my youth.)They have made it much easier and more organic to manage all your email settings now by adding the new email preferences link that allows you to control how all email is sent to you.Click on the settings tab (hover over your name) in the top right corner and land on this page:

Now if you click on the Email Preferences Tab you can manage messaging to you via email:

• Select the types of messages you're willing to receive• Set the frequency of emails• Select who can send you invitations• Set the frequency of group digest emails

And you can manage how LinkedIn pushes information to you via email by clicking on the Frequency of Emails link. All this in one place!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Recently I received an email from one of my LinkedIn connections requesting that I “remove him from my list”. This person is a connection that I know personally and I was surprised at the email since I don’t have a list and wasn’t sure what he meant. Turns out he was referring to the frequency of my LinkedIn status updates… seems he had all his connections status updates set to come to his inbox and my daily updates were becoming “too much noise”.

For a recruiter, this can be a fine (on) line to walk… how many updates are necessary and how many are too much? My solution was to twofold… to show my connection how to manage his LinkedIn Status Updates and for me to manage my LinkedIn tweets and only post the tweets especially relevant to my network and my role as a recruiter. Seems I have gotten a bit overenthusiastic on twitter lately. 

My part was accomplished by going to my LinkedIn settings under “manage twitter preferences” and checking the box to only post my tweets with #in instead of every tweet that was going out.

For all of you out there who are having this problem, here are the steps to manage your LinkedIn Status Updates so that you won’t be affected by all the online noise. This is how you can turn off status updates on your LinkedIn Profile and you won’t receive any of them at all in your stream:

1. Go to your LinkedIn profile and click on your name in the top right corner

2. Click on SETTINGS

3. Click on the ACCOUNT tab on the left bottom of the page

4. Under settings – click on “customize updates you see on your home page”

5. Under the General tab uncheck the “status updates from your connections”

Hope this helps… we are all out here in the sphere together… let’s all try and get along.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

All the headlines I read today seem to contain numbers; 13 Strangest Ways People Found Out Bin Laden Died, 3 Traits of the Most Compelling Internet Companies, 6 Tips to Improve Your Cover Letter, The 3 P’s of Success, 10 Tips To Get People To Act On Your Emails, Top 10 Corporate Blogs and 33 Clever and Creative Billboard Ads. Are we becoming a society reduced to getting our information fed to us in list form? This actually works for me as I constantly multi task and am easily distracted. (oohhh, something shiny...)

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, back to numbers. If I can recall my numerology training, we could have a little fun figuring out the meaning of all these numbers. Today is turning out to be my day of Fives… which was actually the numerology value of my maiden name. Now 5 is the number of senses we have and is a very tactile number, describing feelings, sensations and emotions.

All my tweets so far today have been about Fives… 5 Ways to Be More Efficient on Twitter, 5 Top Mobile Marketing Myths and 5 Best Practices for Travel and Tourism Brands on Facebook. I must be feeling the love because to continue with this theme, I’m dedicating my blog today to the Top 5 Reasons I Love My Job. There are way more than just 5 reasons I love my job… there are many reasons why Intuit has been on Fortune Magazine’s Top 100 Employers List for the past decade. In fact last year, we moved up to number 44… not too shabby! So let’s have a big GROUP HUG and find out my personal top 5:

1. My passion: I love recruiting and especially enjoy my role as a strategic sourcing recruiter. We receive extensive training in cutting edge social media recruiting tactics, encouraged to blog, tweet, make videos, post on Facebook and YouTube.

2. My colleagues: I am working with the best group of people! They are truly supportive, helpful and appreciative of the work we all do, always ready to help out wherever possible and provide positive feedback

3. Company culture: We have a flexible workplace, collaborative environment that encourages innovation and personal development, and is friendly, open and positive

4. Our Products: Intuit has a suite of products that address almost every financial management need for consumers and small businesses. We have the opportunity to work on reqs for high demand, cutting edge technology and business processes in areas like; Mobile, Social Media, SaaS, Global and Data

Monday, March 14, 2011

Those of you who have been following my tweets are aware that I have been strongly evangelizing my company's involvement in our push to “data driven decision making”. We are offering our products as online/SaaS offerings as well as mobile applications. With this direction, data becomes more and more a priority and talking point.

From Intuit’s business perspective… one of our greatest assets is in the data we collect through our software and services for small businesses and general consumers. Our goal is to transform our data assets into innovative services to better serve our customers. We are currently in the process of transforming our DaaA strategy... specifically in web analytics. We are focusing our efforts on data driven insights on customer behavior, customer acquisition and lifetime value. Over the course of the next two years we will be building a linked collection of data assets to provide near real-time market intelligence to our internal and external customers.

From our recruiting perspective… how do we use data as a two way experience in our recruiting efforts; for a better candidate experience as well as from a branding and awareness recruiting best practice? Being on the forefront of Social Media recruiting, I am taking this discussion to the cloud and would appreciate your insights as candidates, customers, colleagues and interested parties.

Intuit Careers already has a strong presence on Facebook as demonstrated by the data we receive from fans and downloads of our video chat presentations. We also have a strong LinkedIn presence with our Intuit Careers page, Alumni Community, Data and Insights Community and many other Intuit product pages. We are also seeing more and more candidates following and interacting with Intuit Careers on twitter (follow @intuitcareers and our list of Intuit Recruiters).

Going one step further I am proposing using our YouTube channel as a recommendation engine and am asking you to visit Intuit Careers on YouTube where we have many videos posted about our products, culture and our various business units. Go ahead… surf, browse, view, play, share and most of all comment! We want your opinions/feedback/suggestions here: www.youtube.com/intuitcareers.

Pease give us your honest feedback as your insights will help us shape and improve the way we interact with you through our social media channels. Stay tuned… more to follow!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

There is just no getting around it… LinkedIn has become the major player in networking. Whether you are looking for sales contacts, employees, or just company information; this should be your first stop on the research train. If you are unemployed, underemployed or just looking for that dream job… this tool could just be your ticket.

Recruiters have been using LinkedIn for years to source passive candidates. Why don’t you join the party and use LinkedIn to network for a job? Intuit is proud to have the most connected woman on LinkedIn as a part of our Right Talent team. Stacy Zapar has over 30,000 first degree LinkedIn connections and she will be on the Intuit Careers Live Video Career Advice Series Facebook Chat on Thursday, February 17th at 11:00 am PST.

No matter if you are a seasoned LinkedIn Uber user or a relative Newbie to the tool, you will find something to take away from this chat. Please join Stacy Zapar tomorrow as she discusses how to use LinkedIn in your job search.
Participating is simple. Log on to www.facebook.com/intuitcareers and click on the chat and blogs tab on the left hand side of our page up to 10 minutes prior to the chat beginning. You do not need a webcam to participate. After Stacy’s presentation you will be able to text chat in your questions for Stacy to answer live.

And while you're at it... if we are not already connected on LinkedIn… here is a QuickLink invitation to join my network: http://bit.ly/feKQg0. Hope to connect with you soon and Happy Networking!

Monday, February 07, 2011

Mark your calendars and join us tomorrow. Intuit Careers resident career advice expert and social media leader, Gail Houston, will be hosting a live video chat on our Facebook page tomorrow… here are the details. Hope to see you there!

You are invited to attend the Intuit Careers Live Video Chat Career Advice Series Tuesday, Feb 8th at 11PST. Gail Houston from Intuit, co-lead of Crossroads Career Transition Workshop will teach applicants how to create a resume that will get noticed – even if you are entry level. Participating is simple. Log into Facebook up to 10 minutes prior to the chat beginning. You do not need a webcam to participate. After Gail’s presentation you will be able to text chat in your questions for Gail to answer live.

You will enter the room as a participant. You can either use your name or it will default to User####. All participants will be able to ask questions by entering questions in the text chat box at the right hand corner of the room.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Whew… just finished my very first video chat on Facebook. Glad that’s over. I couldn’t get out of that chat room fast enough. Sorry Gail for leaving you hanging. I’m not usually the nervous type but working with technology and all the hiccups we’ve been having lately, I was expecting the worst. Thankfully all the technology worked just fine… it was me that had the “technical difficulties”.

I can sit and write forever… give great advice, respond to questions and actually sound moderately intelligent, because of the ability to edit before sending. Unfortunately my mouth doesn’t have an edit filter and I tend to blurt out the first thing that enters my pretty little head. So if you were on the chat today, hopefully you enjoyed the presentation and could appreciate my slightly warped sense of humor. My apologies if anyone was offended. I promise to do better next time… if I’m ever asked to do it again.

If you missed the chat, the slides will be uploaded on slideshare.net and here is my Top Ten List:

#10. We receive an email with the subject line: “do you have any job openings?”
#9. We receive a resume for a candidate asking us “what do you think of my resume?”
#8. The resume is full of spelling and grammatical errors and has an inappropriate email address.
#7. We receive an email with no resume attached or no contact information.
#6. The candidate applied to over 20 jobs in the database in all different disciplines.
#5. The candidate will not disclose current or last salary.
#4. The candidate becomes angry with denied an interview.
#3. The request is to “meet for a cup of coffee” to discuss openings at your company.
#2. The candidate clearly doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of the job.
#1. This is your LinkedIn profile picture:

Monday, January 03, 2011

It’s Sunday, January 2, 2011 and I’m sitting in my living room looking at all my Christmas decorations thinking… this is really going to take a lot of time and effort to put all these away, and today is the best time for me to do this since it’s back to work tomorrow. My next thought is… so what else can I do to procrastinate? I know… I’ll write my New Year’s Resolutions for 2011!

Now I have long since abandoned personal New Year’s resolutions so this posting will be dedicated to my professional endeavors to make myself a better recruiter. I will try and keep it short and succinct. (My recruiting Jedi master will admonish me for that last statement… Do or do not, there is no try.) Anyway, here is the list:

1. I will answer all my emails… yes all of them.

2. The priority and job appropriate emails will be responded to within 24 hours and the courtesy emails within 72 hours. (OK, realistically 120 hours… but no more than 5 days.)

3. I will enter all my candidates into the database, completely filling in all the fields and attaching a new copy of their resume and ALL notes.

4. I will keep all of my submitted candidates informed of their status within 72 hours of submission… even if it is just to apprise them there is no feedback from the hiring manager.

5. Once I receive an open requisition, I will submit at least 3 qualified candidates within 7 working days.

6. I will proactively source candidates in anticipation of future needs and have them packaged and ready to go when new requisitions are open.

7. I will accomplish these goals in a timely manner that will not interfere with my personal activities and time allotted to my family and friends. 8. Oh, and I almost forgot… I will finish writing and post my blogs the day I begin them. And post a minimum of 2 blogs each and every month.

Just how long do you think it will take for me to break these resolutions? Would any of you analytics professionals out there like to help me create a test? The Vegas money has the odds at 5 to 1 for three weeks. Personally, my money is on the length of time it takes my naturally red hair to lose its fiery, copper red sheen… typically between 4-6 weeks.

In the interim, and just for grins, I’d like to know how long you think it will take and/or how long it usually takes you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Please complete this survey… we can all have a good laugh next month.